I am sure you must have a Wordpress blog or have thought of having a blog on Wordpress. If you own a blog on Wordpress, you must be familiar with the Wordpress themes or WP themes. WP themes refer to the blog design. It is similar to web design; however, there are few things you should know before developing a WP theme for your blog or even hiring a developer to design the blog.



For those of you who don't know what a WP theme is, A WP theme is a design that can be integrated with Wordpress to give your website some shape and color. It is similar to website design; only that you should be aware of the WP platform and how to use it to design your blog.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of websites out there offering FREE WP themes for you to download and use on your blog. They are marketing their design services through these free themes. Free themes are good if you are on a budget. But if you really want to stand out of the crowd and impress the visitors, you should consider spending $500 to $900 on a WP theme design.

Wordpress themes are designed using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), HTML, XHTML and PHP. You should be well-versed in these languages to design a unique WP theme. All most all of the files in WP themes have a .php extension. These are php files and you have to include HTML and CSS style sheet to integrate the HTML and CSS code. HTML is used for general design while CSS is used to implement a style on the webpage. You can literally design anything using these languages.

The WP themes reside in the Wordpress subdirectories like wp-content/themes/. The subdirectories in themes folder contains all the Theme's style sheet file, template files and a functions file (functions.php) and of course, images. So the themes directory may contain one or more themes. For example, a theme called 'WDH' would be in the wp-content/themes/WDH directory.

By default, Wordpress platform include two themes: "Classic" and "Default". Open the files in any HTML editor and study them carefully. You will be able to understand the standard coding Wordpress uses for themes.

So if you want to design your own WP theme, start researching the free WP themes which you can download from a WP theme website for free. Open the index.php, style.css and functions.php files and study them carefully. You will understand how WP themes are designed and which standards are used to integrate the themes in the Wordpress platform. If you know CSS and PHP, you will able to start designing your own WP themes in hours!

If you are not a designer, you can ask a friend or a designer to design a unique theme for your Wordpress blog. If you really want to earn substantial money through your blog and increase traffic, you should consider hiring unique designers who can transform your blog in to an aesthetically-pleasing, traffic pulling site which will eventually help you earn money through advertisements.